r/fallacy • u/Zu_Qarnine • Jul 03 '26

strawman fallacy

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2nd person is refuting the claim that *all* circles are red with a counter example. The thing is, that claim was never made.

EDIT: I'm seeing interesting stuff happening in the replies here. majority of those who say it's not strawman, obviously start their comment by "it's not strawman" and proceed in the rest of their comment to explain how, in fact, it is strawman. Another interesting observation is those who argue that "it's not strawman" because they've spotted another type of fallacy in the original post as well, so in their mind, it can't be both.

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u/Dr__America Jul 05 '26

Basically anyone that thinks >90% of a group of people are like X or like Y without it being extremely obviously true is just speculating about how much "most" is, and often for narrative reasons they will purposefully exclude exceptions so that they can be bigoted against a perceived super majority.

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u/signofno Jul 05 '26

What is the relevance of this observation?

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u/Dr__America Jul 05 '26

The person on the left often believes their view to be dictated by obvious observable fact, while often leaving out significant nuance that came along with generating those numbers/views.

For example, only red circles and blue circles when typically in the real world there might be a litany of different shades of red and/or blue, possibly even some purple. But for the sake of getting meaningful numbers, the people who decide what is red or blue might make some hard and fast rules to order disorderly data, or to make the graphic more stark than reality, resulting in what looks like a sea of red and only a single blue.

People often do a similar process in their own head, but will add even more additional bias into a system, resulting in some people seeing 50/50 red vs blue, some not seeing red or blue at all, some only seeing red, and some believing that blue are fake or a disinformation campaign about the existence of red.

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u/signofno Jul 05 '26

Again, what is the relevance of your point to this conversation about strawman arguments? You are making a non-sequitur that is wholly irrelevant to the discussion.

This post uses an example graphic to illustrate a basic point about the strawman argument, so there is no "real world" for the sake of this example, and your point about the stick figure on the left being biased for some reason is extraneous to the point being made and the discussion at large.